In May this year cloudcomputing.info reported about Citrix which announced Project Olympus, a cloud infrastructure under development based on the OpenStack project. Last week though Citrix announced that it acquired Cloud.com, the company which provides the orchestration tool for managing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) called CloudStack. CloudStack left stealth mode entering the IaaS cloud computing market in May last year. It’s unclear wheter Project Olympus was based on the CloudStack products in the first place, or if Project Olympus will be stopped based on this acquisition, where Citrix will probably integrate some functionality into the next version.
CloudStack provides virtual machines self-service provisioning, dynamic workload management, virtual network fencing and routing, usage metering and billing, support for snapshots and rollbacks, ISOs and VM templates library, delegate administration, multi-tenancy and web access on top of VMware ESX, Citrix XenServer, Xen and KVM (Microsoft Hyper-V is expected to be supported soon). Cloudstack leverages components from – and contributes to the OpenStack community, which further develops the technology from RackSpace and NASA which was released as open source in July last year and for which Citrix is second largest contributor at this moment.
Currently CloudStack is at version 2.2. which was released in March this year.
With this acquisition Citrix can now provide a full portfolio of virtualization, orchestration and networking solutions for building Cloud solutions.